Peter Pan

Classic though it is, there can be something twee about stagings of JM Barrie's sad meditation on the nature of ageing. All that opening jollity in the nursery, the shaggy dog prancing around and the mother, described as the "loveliest lady in Bloomsbury", heading out to a dinner date with her husband. The playwright's sentimentalisation of the bourgeois nuclear family can come across as sickly sweet. It is often forgotten they are supposed to be short on cash.

Which is why this sky-bound tale is anchored more firmly than usual in Jeremy Raison's production: a free interpretation of the play, set on the fifth floor of a Glasgow tenement. Here, Helen Mallon's Wendy Darling is pragmatic rather than precious, robust more than romantic. She does not ask you to fall in love with her - not even when she is rejected by the whimsical Peter Pan - but she commands your respect as she stoically takes the Lost Boys under her wing and holds her own in the swashbuckling battles with Captain Hook's pirates.

The home she is escaping, however much it symbolises comfort and stability, is a real place where bills have to be paid and the landlady kept sweet. The Neverland she finds herself in is made more exotic by Robbie Towns, whose Peter has an other-worldly American accent. Not only is he incapable of feeling mature emotions such as sadness and loss, he is even unfamiliar with the good Scottish verb "to greet", meaning to cry. The gulf between Wendy and this boy who will never grow up is formidable.

Towns is an athletic Peter, bounding across the stage, whether under his own steam or the well-concealed ropes on Jason Southgate's dimly lit set. Technically strong, Raison's production makes use of a range of effects from the clever flickers of light to mark the passage of Tinker Bell about the stage to the magical mirror that refuses Peter a reliable reflection and the sequences of marauding pirates in shadowy silhouette.

Andrew Clark plays Hook with a dark relish, bringing the production as close as it gets to pantomime. The young audience are duly captivated by the fun and adventure, even if, by rushing the resuscitation of a poisoned Tinker Bell and underplaying the poignancy of Wendy and Peter's impossible relationship, the production skirts over the play's emotional core.